Escaped Thoughts

It's officially Christmas. This isn't a surprise, of course, but just in case I had somehow missed it, Safeway was thoughtful enough to remind me during the entirety of my shopping by playing non-stop from a collection called “Top 100 Bad Holiday Covers And Remixes By No-Name Artists”.

At least, that's what I assume it was called.

Category: Society

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Today was cascading build failure day. Whee! Fun for the whole family. It's going to be a while before I start feeling bad about at any times I might briefly break the Camino tree again; today I spent enough time on build failures that were not my fault that I think I have a large stockpile of build karma.

The fun began with an SVG change that assumed Cairo, which therefore started the Camino tree burning. So SVG was disabled in Camino, but then Xcode was unhappy about a missing file. I misunderstood the reason for the missing file and thought the best way to deal with the problem was to go ahead and land my Cairo build patch right away. Which did need to happen soon, but in retrospect it would probably have been nice to wait for another day just to spread out the flames a bit. So anyway, when the tree stayed red I learned that the file was missing even with SVG enabled, on purpose, so turning on Cairo didn't actually help that particular problem. So I ripped out references to that file, and would have gone back to doing something useful with my day except that right around then we discovered that Cairo didn't build on 10.3. Oops. And the red continues.

What followed was a tedious debugging process where we finally found that this was a latent bug in cairo-cocoa, that no amount of testing on 10.4 would have found (yay! not my fault!). One of the files was being built in a very un-kosher way that hid (on the Firefox build machine) the fact that it was written using 10.4-only stuff, when it's supposed to build for 10.3. And our build machines are 10.3. And there was no easy fix. Good times.

So faced with either backing out Cairo (which would just open us up for more pain due to the trunk==Cairo mindset of the moment) or hacking around it in fairly ugly ways, I chose the latter. All was going well, until I discovered that one of our build machines is 10.4, and because of how badly messed up the compiling of that file was handled, My hack had broken the ability to build for 10.3 on 10.4. So the hacking got uglier, to the point where I thought long and hard about just backing out Cairo instead. But there the new hacks are, and over nine hours after this roller-coaster of build excitement began, things are finally green again.

Thanks for asking—how was your day?

Category: Camino

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